Introduction for special issue on “Excellence, diversity, and the philosophy exception”

Abstract

The lack of diversity in philosophy has been of particular concern to the profession in recent years, and much has been done in response to track, interpret, and remedy this longstanding problem. Contributing to that ongoing effort, this special issue opens new avenues for theoretical reflection and practical transformation. Together, the papers investigate the factors that contribute to the discipline's persistent lack of diversity, including common assumptions, ordinary practices, and customary arrangements that are often taken for granted in the profession and tend to remain unquestioned. Each paper explores in a distinctive way the dynamics of exclusion that structure philosophy's institutional life while suggesting specific measures and concrete actions to address these issues and to effectively bring about greater diversity.

The aspiration that “philosophy should be among the most diverse of the academic disciplines, not among the least diverse” (Schwitzgebel, 2020) may arise from appreciating that injustice, whether stemming from epistemic, social, institutional, or practical obstacles, is preventing full or equal participation in the discipline. In addition, a substantive diversity of social backgrounds and philosophical approaches among participants seems essential to both realizing and guaranteeing the open-ended, open-minded, and critical project that philosophy aspires to be. Yet recognizing this to be the case in theory is often at odds with deeply held forms of practice.

Indeed, it has been striking to us as guest editors how otherwise typical, perfectly ordinary editorial processes may come at a cost both for marginally situated individuals and the profession as a whole, resulting in our finding the same sorts of faces, body-minds, and perspectives in the room or on the page. There are telling experiences among those who had taken the time, care, and energy to write and revise papers for this special issue, only to withdraw them later in response to reviewers' comments; or in response to the need to strategically and carefully ration their time and energy as they navigated the kind of precarious employment that falls so hard on those without the material or social capital to cushion their career aspirations. It is important to note that our observations do not apply to this journal specifically; nor do they seek to impugn any reviewer's or editor's intentions or character. Rather, the observations that follow reflect more structural issues. We know that the notorious yet all-too-common gatekeeping question “how is this paper philosophy?,” which captures what Kristie Dotson (2012) has called the culture of justification, is one that looms large in the experience of underrepresented groups in philosophy, who report being repeatedly and disproportionately asked to justify the relevance of their research questions and approaches, and thereby arguably their very presence in the field (more on this in Catala's piece in the present issue). Similarly, the third round of revisions and responses to reviewers may be one bridge too far for someone juggling too many responsibilities with too few resources, or even for those in secure employment who find themselves continually answering for (what dominantly situated or dominantly acting or passing members of the discipline perceive as) their “special,” non-normative perspectives. For some, philosophy may be too “tough,” not because it is more rigorous, but because it is less curious and hospitable, such that, as Jenkins argues, there may be better academic options, both disciplinary and transdisciplinary, elsewhere.

The quality assurance process that rigorous peer review aims to guarantee matters greatly, of course, and most reviewers no doubt act in good faith, contributing their time and expertise generously. Similarly, dedicated editors who sincerely believe in the value of promoting the contributions of members of underrepresented groups in philosophy may go to great lengths and work hard toward publishing their work. Things are no doubt better than they were 10 years ago, thanks to these efforts. Yet good intentions (or the absence of bad ones) are not always enough to prevent exclusionary dynamics, given that we are operating in a context where our professional habits and practices often unreflectively maintain problematic norms and assumptions that asymmetrically burden and exclude members of underrepresented groups. Addressing this persistent problem, as Catala's piece argues, is not a matter of abandoning valuable editorial and epistemic goals such as rigor and quality, but rather of appreciating that the ways in which they are typically defined and ordinarily assessed tend to reflect and therefore prioritize the perspectives and interests of dominant groups to the detriment of those of non-dominant groups.

Thus, while academics have increasingly come to appreciate the need to create more diverse and inclusive communities in philosophy, this awareness by itself is insufficient to bring about the kind of deep change that is required to dismantle persistent obstacles to the entry, participation, and retention of diverse practitioners. Several papers in the present issue (Jenkins, Bayruns-Garcia, and Catala) highlight the discipline's characteristic reproduction of norms and rubrics of excellence along with the various forms of epistemic injustice and ignorance that accompany them. In doing so, these papers invite critical reflection on how philosophers' practices of judging excellence often fail to accurately track or discern the qualities they claim to promote, thereby questioning whether such rubrics should be used or how they should be defined.

Acceptance of the need for change can also be seriously compromised when institutional priorities are driven by socio-economic factors. Even as “diversity” discourse has grown throughout academia in the last decade, precarious forms of employment in the neo-liberal academy that exploit marginalized labor have simultaneously flourished. These forms of employment have proven to be effective gatekeepers of professional philosophy, as Wieseler argues here by carefully considering the profound disadvantages faced by non-tenure track philosophers, charged with exceptional burdens of care for students while occupying precarious positions. Relatedly, an emphasis on research productivity, for instance, erases many important forms of academic labor such as teaching and pastoral care (which are more likely to be performed by women, including women of color, non-tenured, and junior faculty), and thereby stacks the career progression deck against some of the profession's most critical workers. An attachment to the quantitative metrics that encode privilege, or to the myth of meritocracy that justifies them, can thus obscure very powerful mechanisms of discrimination and exclusion.

These points illustrate a theme that consistently runs throughout this special issue, namely the sheer depth and scope of interventions required. Prevailing institutional policies tend to place the burden of change on individuals or offer necessary yet insufficient equity mechanisms (such as improved parental leave) while leaving more insidious academic structures and practices unchallenged. An exclusive emphasis on individuals, moreover, leads to a focus on the microlevel of psychological bias or discrimination rather than on those macrolevel institutional or structural aspects of the discipline that contribute to a lack of diversity by producing and maintaining a credibility and intelligibility economy that systematically favors and enables privileged groups while systematically excluding and undermining marginalized groups (Catala, 2019; Fricker, 2007).

Another strong theme in this special issue foregrounds the affective life of professional philosophy and its role in maintaining injustice, a point that registers in Wieseler's discussion of “hope labor” as the form of attachment to a precarious existence in the discipline. Churcher insightfully articulates the connection between the individual and institutional levels by analyzing the problem of how to shift relations of power as requiring us to take seriously the importance of affective engagements with institutional life. Like Wieseler, she articulates an idea of philosophy that goes against the grain of the mainstream in understanding its form of learning as visceral and embodied. The significance of this approach is to draw attention to the lived experience of tacit assumptions and automatic practices, whose unreflective acceptance contributes to maintain the status quo. Moreover, it shows how active engagement and explicit questioning will properly result in discomfort for dominantly situated practitioners, who may have gotten used to shaping or guarding the field, while non-dominant practitioners are forced to leave or face its inequities. In line with this insight, Wiedel's contribution explores ways of pushing back against such historic patterns of injustice, by examining a deeply uncomfortable space giving rise to practical and ethical questions about the collective treatment of those accused of sexual misconduct by their students or colleagues. On what grounds, Wiedel asks, can we justify sexual harassers' exclusion and shunning by their fellow professionals? What kinds of communities are we part of as philosophers, and to whom or what do we owe responsibility on that basis?

The idea of philosophy as a professional community that gives rise to obligations opens the vast yet crucial question, running through all these papers, of how we act to change our discipline. Who is responsible for bringing about change and what do they need to do? Collectively, contributors to this special issue offer not only theoretical, but also practical resources to critique, resist, and transform what remains, for some would-be participants, a dispiritingly hostile environment. Together, these contributions advocate for transformations not only at an individual level but also at a structural level.

Jenkins argues that the form in which we imagine progressive change in closing the gender gap can miss the need for disruptive transformation to bring necessary structural shifts. The question “why so slow?” (Valian, 1997) invites progressive reform against a benchmark of idealized progress, but it may neglect how transformation has historically actually taken place in disciplines, and very often by virtue of disrupting rather than reforming methods and priorities. Transformation in what counts as central or peripheral disciplinary knowledge, for instance, may be a disruptive element that both responds to and promotes demographic change. Jenkins proposes that we might therefore usefully consider the positive question of what kinds of disciplinary changes have closed the gender gap in some fields (as, e.g., in sociology or history) instead of focusing primarily on the lack of progress in closing gender gaps in others. She cites research that shows a “high degree of correlation between the standing and incorporation of gender and feminist scholarship into the disciplinary mainstream and the rates at which women have advanced” in the social sciences. Moreover, she argues that comparing philosophy with other social sciences rather than with the hard sciences may reveal how problematic disciplinary self-images can still be engaged when we set out to criticize gender inequality. Jenkins shows how the claim that philosophy simply “is” a male-associated discipline, or is “like math,” forms an image of appropriate rigor that continues to shape patterns of exclusion and inclusion, working in tandem with the social and professional construction of qualities like excellence, quality, credibility, and intelligibility (Catala and Bayruns-Garcia). She also shows why we must pay critical attention to excellence metrics that tend to exercise a strong exclusionary effect in policing disciplinary perceptions of central and peripheral knowledge, thus reproducing as normative the perceived successes of the past. The point extends to questioning how we deploy our normative assumptions about the natural path of progress for individuals, for example, by assuming the value of a career in professional philosophy, when we might instead give more attention and support to the significance of interdisciplinary careers.

The importance of disruptive change is no less embraced by Bayruns-Garcia, who questions the assumption that admissions committee members can adequately distinguish between students who have more and less philosophical skill based on differences between applicants' materials, when social group membership largely determines the quality of these materials. Such decisions are ostensibly based purely on a demonstration of philosophical skills. Yet if the appearance of exceptional philosophical skill is often largely a result of unfair advantage, what legitimacy—and what consequences—do such judgments have? Bayruns-Garcia argues that the evaluation practices that currently prevail in admissions, hiring, or funding decision processes fail to accurately track candidates' quality or skills and hence cannot be said to be meritocratic. Rather, current selection practices and processes tend to track racial injustice and demographic inequities instead of excellence. If admissions committees aim to properly assess applicants' philosophical skill, they ought to focus not solely on the outcome or materials provided by applicants, but also on the process whereby these application materials were produced, which involves both external and internal factors, and is affected by racial injustice. Yet, as the literatures on epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic injustice have repeatedly shown, the very existence of racial injustice makes it less likely that committee members will be able to achieve understanding due to implicit or explicit prejudice regarding the philosophical potential of applicants or their areas of interest, such as philosophy of race, for example, which is more likely to be an area of research for BIPOC applicants than for Whites. This is why Bayruns-Garcia advocates for the implementation of institutional or departmental bodies or policies that would bypass the potentially high degree of ignorance of individual admissions committee members (and their assumptions about what or who is central or peripheral to the discipline) by compelling them to use more inclusive criteria and considerations when making admissions decisions. Here the deprivileging of individual judgment relative to institutional protocol is utilized to foster greater diversity.

Catala argues that prevailing norms of academic excellence in philosophy produce a distinctively structural or institutional form of epistemic injustice. Whether they operate in the context of selection or evaluation committees, peer-review, conference rooms, or classrooms, norms and criteria that seem reasonable, universal, or neutral reflect the perspectives and interests of dominantly situated members of the profession. For example, the criterion of “reasonable productivity” may seem perfectly neutral but will tend to exclude those with less time, energy, or opportunity, thus potentially discriminating against differences along axes such as gender, disability, class, and race. Most problematically, these norms of academic excellence end up not only excluding or marginalizing members of non-dominant groups, but also legitimating this exclusion or marginalization via the appearance of neutrality. Structural biases encoded in various epistemic processes and practices across research, teaching, and service result in differential allocations of credibility and intelligibility that make it difficult, if not impossible, for members of non-dominant groups to be recognized as equal and full members of the philosophical community, and for non-dominant perspectives and approaches to come across as plausible and valid. Unjust epistemic processes and practices structuring academia thus produce an unjust epistemic economy whereby members of non-dominant groups face undue deficits of credibility and intelligibility. Practicing philosophy “well,” then, is distorted structurally, and is as much about conforming to certain norms that govern perception of skill as it is about any independent quality. Features like institutional pedigree, or a writing or speaking style that conforms to norms of self-confidence, can carry a person far, to the detriment of minoritized body-minds as well as non-dominant linguistic, racial, or socio-economic identities. Catala proposes that moving toward greater structural epistemic justice in philosophy requires reconceptualizing academic excellence from feminist epistemological insights and redefining excellence as a property of the philosophical community as a whole, rather than a property of particular individuals. Crucial practices here include actively recruiting, welcoming, encouraging, supporting, rewarding, and retaining members of underrepresented groups and recognizing the philosophical value and relevance of diverse research questions and methods, including ones that start from lived, embodied experiences of social inequality. Catala's re-conception of excellence as a property of an academic community or discipline echoes both Wiedel's focus on the obligations of the community that is professional philosophy and Jenkins's invitation to consider how “understandings of progress in knowledge and other kinds of social progress [are] intertwined.”

Wieseler focuses on systemic injustice with particular attention paid to how precarious employment has grown to be a norm in universities. The myth of meritocracy is not only a pernicious one when it comes to generating belief in the neutrality and objectivity of judgments of excellence, but also draws attention away from the structural conditions of employment by enforcing a focus on the individual and their “hard work” as conditions of success. Indeed the “myth of work as its own reward” (Zheng) also particularly impacts philosophers. The risks of engaging in “hope labor” are severe. This kind of labor fails to provide conditions conducive to flourishing, while employers again place the onus on employees as individuals, for instance by requiring them to practice self-care. Yet non-tenure track professionals are not inherently vulnerable; rather, they are vulnerabilized (Tremain, 2021): their situation arises from institutional choices about whom to support academically and whom to exploit. Non-tenure track faculty, moreover, are made vulnerable to exploitation in ways that reflect gendered patterns of injustice. For example, caring about and feeling a sense of obligation for the well-being of students, both translates into a motivation and into an expectation (falling on women especially) to perform labor that goes beyond what is contractually required. This emotional burden constitutes a form of labor that is essential for the flourishing of students and the wider academic community, yet is unlikely to be recognized or “counted.” This leads Wieseler to argue for the necessity of collective change in employment practices, instead of placing the burden on individuals via “hard-work” or “self-care” narratives while keeping the system unchanged.

Churcher offers an analysis of the “institutional imaginary” to capture the ways in which the “experiences, attachments, and interests of white, middle-class, able-bodied males have played a foundational role in shaping the norms and practices particular to philosophy and have been influential in determining whose insights and concerns are perceived to have salience, authority, and credibility.” To the extent that women have been permitted to participate, it has been effectively as “apprentices” to those taken to be “masters” of thought. Pulling together several themes from the previous papers in this analysis, Churcher explores the possibilities of inverting conventional power relations to create an “obverse apprenticeship” of the institutionally powerful to the institutionally marginalized. By attending to diverse perspectives and bodies, an apprenticeship to learning “otherwise” is designed to counter some of the deep imaginaries that continue to structure expectations of the correct bodies to fill spaces of privilege. Imagination is as essential to change as the imaginary may be to stasis; and Churcher invites us to imagine a new institutional practice, a form of apprenticeship running counter to normal rules of hierarchy whereby the task of the powerful is to learn from the marginalized. In disrupting established routines, she suggests, a wider space of learning in the academy may be opened.

Wiedel's contribution explores some of the consequences of the “institutional imaginary” identified by Churcher as it manifests in widespread experiences of sexual harassment and assault reported by women in philosophy. His article examines the obligations of the philosophical community to respond to those perpetrators who are part of it. One response is shunning alleged perpetrators, which may take practical forms, such as exclusion from conferences, or philosophical forms, such as refusing to include their work as a reference in reading lists or in one's research. Yet anyone with experience recognizes that determining the appropriate degree and form of response to alleged sexual misconduct on the part of faculty raises challenging practical and ethical questions. Wiedel argues that we must begin by recognizing that our “status as a profession begets a particular moral community in which we are invested.” Although that professional standing may be less well-organized and powerful than is the case for professions such as law or medicine, where the power to exclude those who violate professional norms is clearly encoded and enforceable, there are nonetheless specific responsibilities that flow from professionalization. Philosophers, by virtue of their participation in the profession, are required to uphold certain norms, including through actively censoring misconduct. Wiedel argues that shunning those with well-grounded cases of malfeasance raised against them is not only useful in deterrence but is also required as a duty. Practices of shunning those who have been plausibly accused are the responsibility of fellow philosophers, given that they are necessary to secure the integrity and professionalism of the discipline. Such practices also play a crucial role in demonstrating that the profession takes the perspectives of victims seriously, and not only formally values but also actively works toward their retention and flourishing.

As should be clear by now, the aim of this collection is not simply to lament, nor only to analyze, but to offer some resources in response to philosophy's lack of diversity. This special issue, therefore, includes a contribution from Alison Wylie and her team, describing their work on a much-needed web resource, “The Philosophy Exception.” As Wylie points out, philosophy's demographic challenges include a degree of diversity that is not only staggeringly low, but also incredibly resistant to change: over no fewer than three decades, numbers have all but stagnated—even when non-negligible demographic improvements have simultaneously been observed in STEM fields. Built by Wylie and a team of graduate students, the website provides a bibliographical database of publications in English that document, theorize, and suggest interventions to address issues of equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization (EDID) in philosophy. By consolidating sources in a single, dedicated database (one that invites further contributions and will be regularly updated) the website itself constitutes an important intervention. It both tackles the lack of visibility affecting publications that appear outside mainstream venues (as is often the case with EDID publications) as a result of the very exclusionary dynamics these publications address, and provides a powerful counter to the charge of “insufficient data” that often serves to undermine testimonies or calls for change voiced by minoritized and underrepresented groups in philosophy about EDID issues.

It is our hope that this special issue will contribute to promoting EDID in philosophy and speak to the recognition that while we still have a long way to go, there are many things we can all do here and now that will accelerate and support valuable changes in the discipline.